Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness (based on its etymology) is that it is simply the act of making something new.
From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness.
Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, aesthetics, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. And unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.
Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident", "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness, humouR and REM,sleep. Some say it is a trait,we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Creativity has also been viewed as a beneficence of a muse or Muses,
Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, advertising, mathematics, music, science and engineering, and teaching.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques.Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his creative works.
Creativity has been associated with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.
Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas — then discard the useless ones.
The gift of creativity as an enduring personal trait is dependent on at least two different factors. First, there must be an urge, drive, or motivation to create something new; and second, there must be talent to carry out and materialize this creative urge.
These two factors, although expected to complement one another, are in fact independent. The evidence lies in the many individuals who are endowed with only one of the factors, and therefore never succeed in being really creative. We know many artists and scientists who are endowed with an outstanding talent and who possess many of the cognitive features claimed by psychological studies to characterize creativity, but who, owing to a lack of motivation to create something new and original, devote themselves only to performing, teaching, studying, or criticizing art or science created by others. We also know the opposite cases—those artists or scientists who are always driven by a strong motivation to create something.
Creativity in various contexts
Creativity has been studied from a variety of perspectives and is important in numerous contexts. Most of these approaches are undisciplinary, and it is therefore difficult to form a coherent overall view. The following sections examine some of the areas in which creativity is seen as being important.
Creativity Profiles
Creativity comes in different forms. There is kind to produce growth, innovation, speed, etc. There are four “Creativity Profiles” that can help achieve such goals.
(i) Incubate (Long-term Development) (ii) Imagine (Breakthrough Ideas) (iii) Improve (Incremental Adjustments) (iv) Invest (Short-term Goals)
Creativity in art and literature
Most people associate creativity with the fields of art and literature. In these fields, originality is considered to be a sufficient condition for creativity, unlike other fields where both originality and appropriateness are necessary.
Within the different modes of artistic expression, one can postulate a continuum extending from "interpretation" to "innovation". Established artistic movements and genres pull practitioners to the "interpretation" end of the scale, whereas original thinkers strive towards the "innovation" pole. Note that we conventionally expect some "creative" people (dancers, actors, orchestral members, etc.) to perform (interpret) while allowing others (writers, painters, composers, etc.) more freedom to express the new and the different.
Contrast alternative theories, for example:
artistic evolution, which stresses obeying established ("classical") rules and imitating or appropriating to produce subtly different but unshockingly understandable work. Compare with crafts.
artistic conversation, as in Surrealism, which stresses the depth of communication when the creative product is the language.
In the art practice and theory of Davor Dzalto, human creativity is taken as a basic feature of both the personal existence of human being and art production. For this thinker,creativity is a basic cultural and anthropological category, since it enables human manifestation in the world as a "real presence" in contrast to the progressive "virtualisation" of the world.
Creative industries and services
Today, creativity forms the core activity of a growing section of the global economy — the so-called "creative industries" — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services. The Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001 provides an overview of the creative industries in the UK. The creative professional workforce is becoming a more integral part of industrialized nations' economies.
Creative professions include writing, art, design, theater, television, radio, motion pictures, related crafts, as well as marketing, strategy, some aspects of scientific research and development, product development, some types of teaching and curriculum design, and more. Since many creative professionals (actors and writers, for example) are also employed in secondary professions, estimates of creative professionals are often inaccurate. By some estimates, approximately 10 million US workers are creative professionals; depending upon the depth and breadth of the definition, this estimate may be double.
Creativity in other professions
Isaac Newton's law of gravity is popularly attributed to a creative leap he experienced when observing a falling apple.
Creativity is also seen as being increasingly important in a variety of other professions. Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. These fields explicitly value creativity, and journals such as Design Studies have published many studies on creativity and creative problem solving.
Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton shows how some of the major scientific advances of the 20th century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come
Creativity in organizations
Amabile argued that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed:
Organizational support - value emphasis, information sharing, collaboration.
FOSTERING CREATIVITY
Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry:
Establishing purpose and intention
Building basic skills
Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
Building motivation, especially internal motivation
Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
Focusing on mastery and self-competition
Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
Providing opportunities for choice and discovery
Developing self-management (metacognitive skills)
Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
Providing balance
Collaborative learning
Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles.Put differently,collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. Collaborative learning is heavily rooted in Vygotsky’s views that there exists an inherent social nature of learning which is shown through his theory of zone of proximal development. Often, collaborative learning is used as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches in education that involve joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers. Thus, collaborative learning is commonly illustrated when groups of students work together to search for understanding, meaning, or solutions or to create an artifact or product of their learning. Further, collaborative learning redefines traditional student-teacher relationship in the classroom which results in controversy over whether this paradigm is more beneficial than harmful. Collaborative learning activities can include collaborative writing, group projects, joint problem solving, debates, study teams,and other activities. The approach is closely related to cooperative learning.
Examples of Collaborative Learning
Collaborative Networked Learning is a form of collaborative learning for the self-directed adult learner. Youth directed collaboration, another form of self-directed organizing and learning, relies on a novel, more radical concept of youth voice,.
Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)is a relatively new educational paradigm within collaborative learning which uses technology in a learning environment to help mediate and support group interactions in a collaborative learning context. CSCL systems use technology to control and monitor interactions, to regulate tasks, rules, and roles, and to mediate the acquisition of new knowledge.. Most recently, one study showed that using robots in the classroom to promote collaborative learning led to an increase in learning effectiveness of the activity and an increase in the student’s motivation. Researchers and practitioners in several fields, including cognitive sciences, sociology, computer engineering have begun to investigate CSCL, thus, it constitutes a new trans-disciplinary field.
Learning Management Systems is a context that gives collaborative learning particular meaning. In this context, collaborative learning refers to a collection of tools which learners can use to assist, or be assisted by others. Such tools include Virtual Classrooms (i.e. geographically distributed classrooms linked by audio-visual network connections), chat, discussion threads, application sharing (e.g. a colleague projects spreadsheet on another colleague’s screen across a network link for the purpose of collaboration), among many others.
Collaborative Learning Development Enables developers of learning systems to work as a network. Specifically relevant to e-learning where developers can share and build knowledge into courses in a collaborative environment. Knowledge of a single subject can be pulled together from remote locations using software systems.
Collaborative Scripts
Collaborative scripts structure collaborative learning by creating roles and mediating interactions while allowing for flexibility in dialogue and activities Collaborative scripts are used in nearly all cases of collaborative learning some of which are more suited for face-to-face collaborative learning—usually, more flexible—and others for computer-supported collaborative learning—typically, more constraining.[Additionally, there are two broad types of scripts: macro-scripts and micro-scripts. Macro-scripts aim at creating situations within which desired interactions will occur. Micro-scripts emphasize activities of individual learners.
Conceptual Components of Scripts
Objectives
: Help participants (i.e. learners and teachers) work together to engage in efficient collaboration processes to reach specific objectives
Activities
: Identify the activities, and possible constraints, for completing the activities. Activities can include summarizing, questioning, giving an argument, state a claim, etc.
Sequencing
: Explain the expectations of the participants by specifying which activities should be performed and in what order.
Distribute Roles
: Clarify the roles individuals will assume throughout the activity to encourage participants to adopt and consider multiple perspectives.[
Type of Representation//: Textual, graphical, or oral representations of explicit instructions are presented to the participants.
Cooperative learning Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. Students must work in groups to complete the two sets of tasks collectively. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.
Cooperative Learning has 5 basic elements:
Positive Interdependence requires that group members feel connected to each other in the process of accomplishing the goal.
incentive; the reason the group wishes to complete the task
resource; the tools needed to complete the task
role; roles assigned to students to ensure each person contributes
sequence; steps to completing the task
simulation; the alternative mindset needed to complete the goal
outside force; something limiting the time or used as a driving force
environmental; that every group member is in close proximity to one another
identity; that the group feels connected in one team.
Individual Accountability means that every group member is responsible for being able to demonstrate understanding and comprehension of the learned academic expectations and social goals.
Face to Face Interaction suggests that the group must participate by communicating and discussing the goal.
Social Skills include listening, body language, sharing, accepting ideas and differences, etc. These are the skills needed prior to or being developed during the group work.
Processing is when the students assess their efforts as a group and can pin point areas of improvement in their social skills.
When doing activities in Cooperative Learning it is important to do a Contact Activity to ensure that the group has a basis for comfortable communication and feel open to one another.
Benefits include: higher self esteem, achievement and retention of academic information
social support
positive school attitude
positive attitude towards educators and classmates
on-task behaviour
collaborative skills
increase in level of reasoning
Considerations include:
sometimes manipulation of groups may be necessary
some students may not respond well in forced group situations
CREATIVITY
Creativity is a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness (based on its etymology) is that it is simply the act of making something new.
From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness.
Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, aesthetics, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. And unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.
Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident", "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness, humouR and REM,sleep. Some say it is a trait,we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Creativity has also been viewed as a beneficence of a muse or Muses,
Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, advertising, mathematics, music, science and engineering, and teaching.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques.Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his creative works.
Creativity has been associated with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.
Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas — then discard the useless ones.
The gift of creativity as an enduring personal trait is dependent on at least two different factors. First, there must be an urge, drive, or motivation to create something new; and second, there must be talent to carry out and materialize this creative urge.
These two factors, although expected to complement one another, are in fact independent. The evidence lies in the many individuals who are endowed with only one of the factors, and therefore never succeed in being really creative. We know many artists and scientists who are endowed with an outstanding talent and who possess many of the cognitive features claimed by psychological studies to characterize creativity, but who, owing to a lack of motivation to create something new and original, devote themselves only to performing, teaching, studying, or criticizing art or science created by others. We also know the opposite cases—those artists or scientists who are always driven by a strong motivation to create something.
Creativity in various contexts
Creativity has been studied from a variety of perspectives and is important in numerous contexts. Most of these approaches are undisciplinary, and it is therefore difficult to form a coherent overall view. The following sections examine some of the areas in which creativity is seen as being important.
Creativity Profiles
Creativity comes in different forms. There is kind to produce growth, innovation, speed, etc. There are four “Creativity Profiles” that can help achieve such goals.(i) Incubate (Long-term Development) (ii) Imagine (Breakthrough Ideas) (iii) Improve (Incremental Adjustments) (iv) Invest (Short-term Goals)
Creativity in art and literature
Most people associate creativity with the fields of art and literature. In these fields, originality is considered to be a sufficient condition for creativity, unlike other fields where both originality and appropriateness are necessary.Within the different modes of artistic expression, one can postulate a continuum extending from "interpretation" to "innovation". Established artistic movements and genres pull practitioners to the "interpretation" end of the scale, whereas original thinkers strive towards the "innovation" pole. Note that we conventionally expect some "creative" people (dancers, actors, orchestral members, etc.) to perform (interpret) while allowing others (writers, painters, composers, etc.) more freedom to express the new and the different.
Contrast alternative theories, for example:
- artistic inspiration, which provides the transmission of visions from divine sources such as the Muses; a taste of the Divine. Compare with invention.
- artistic evolution, which stresses obeying established ("classical") rules and imitating or appropriating to produce subtly different but unshockingly understandable work. Compare with crafts.
- artistic conversation, as in Surrealism, which stresses the depth of communication when the creative product is the language.
In the art practice and theory of Davor Dzalto, human creativity is taken as a basic feature of both the personal existence of human being and art production. For this thinker,creativity is a basic cultural and anthropological category, since it enables human manifestation in the world as a "real presence" in contrast to the progressive "virtualisation" of the world.Creative industries and services
Today, creativity forms the core activity of a growing section of the global economy — the so-called "creative industries" — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services. The Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001 provides an overview of the creative industries in the UK. The creative professional workforce is becoming a more integral part of industrialized nations' economies.Creative professions include writing, art, design, theater, television, radio, motion pictures, related crafts, as well as marketing, strategy, some aspects of scientific research and development, product development, some types of teaching and curriculum design, and more. Since many creative professionals (actors and writers, for example) are also employed in secondary professions, estimates of creative professionals are often inaccurate. By some estimates, approximately 10 million US workers are creative professionals; depending upon the depth and breadth of the definition, this estimate may be double.
Creativity in other professions
Isaac Newton's law of gravity is popularly attributed to a creative leap he experienced when observing a falling apple.Creativity is also seen as being increasingly important in a variety of other professions. Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. These fields explicitly value creativity, and journals such as Design Studies have published many studies on creativity and creative problem solving.
Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton shows how some of the major scientific advances of the 20th century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come
Creativity in organizations
Amabile argued that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed:- Expertise (technical, procedural & intellectual knowledge),
- Creative thinking skills (how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems),
- and Motivation (especially intrinsic motivation).
There are two types of motivation:- extrinsic motivation - external factors, for example threats of being fired or money as a reward,
- intrinsic motivation - comes from inside an individual, satisfaction, enjoyment of work etc.
Six managerial practices to encourage motivation are:FOSTERING CREATIVITY
Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry:
Collaborative learning
Collaborative learning is a situation in which two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together. More specifically, collaborative learning is based on the model that knowledge can be created within a population where members actively interact by sharing experiences and take on asymmetry roles.Put differently,collaborative learning refers to methodologies and environments in which learners engage in a common task where each individual depends on and is accountable to each other. Collaborative learning is heavily rooted in Vygotsky’s views that there exists an inherent social nature of learning which is shown through his theory of zone of proximal development. Often, collaborative learning is used as an umbrella term for a variety of approaches in education that involve joint intellectual effort by students or students and teachers. Thus, collaborative learning is commonly illustrated when groups of students work together to search for understanding, meaning, or solutions or to create an artifact or product of their learning. Further, collaborative learning redefines traditional student-teacher relationship in the classroom which results in controversy over whether this paradigm is more beneficial than harmful. Collaborative learning activities can include collaborative writing, group projects, joint problem solving, debates, study teams,and other activities. The approach is closely related to cooperative learning.Examples of Collaborative Learning
- Collaborative Networked Learning is a form of collaborative learning for the self-directed adult learner. Youth directed collaboration, another form of self-directed organizing and learning, relies on a novel, more radical concept of youth voice,.
- Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL)is a relatively new educational paradigm within collaborative learning which uses technology in a learning environment to help mediate and support group interactions in a collaborative learning context. CSCL systems use technology to control and monitor interactions, to regulate tasks, rules, and roles, and to mediate the acquisition of new knowledge.. Most recently, one study showed that using robots in the classroom to promote collaborative learning led to an increase in learning effectiveness of the activity and an increase in the student’s motivation. Researchers and practitioners in several fields, including cognitive sciences, sociology, computer engineering have begun to investigate CSCL, thus, it constitutes a new trans-disciplinary field.
- Learning Management Systems is a context that gives collaborative learning particular meaning. In this context, collaborative learning refers to a collection of tools which learners can use to assist, or be assisted by others. Such tools include Virtual Classrooms (i.e. geographically distributed classrooms linked by audio-visual network connections), chat, discussion threads, application sharing (e.g. a colleague projects spreadsheet on another colleague’s screen across a network link for the purpose of collaboration), among many others.
- Collaborative Learning Development Enables developers of learning systems to work as a network. Specifically relevant to e-learning where developers can share and build knowledge into courses in a collaborative environment. Knowledge of a single subject can be pulled together from remote locations using software systems.
- Collaborative Scripts
Collaborative scripts structure collaborative learning by creating roles and mediating interactions while allowing for flexibility in dialogue and activities Collaborative scripts are used in nearly all cases of collaborative learning some of which are more suited for face-to-face collaborative learning—usually, more flexible—and others for computer-supported collaborative learning—typically, more constraining.[Additionally, there are two broad types of scripts: macro-scripts and micro-scripts. Macro-scripts aim at creating situations within which desired interactions will occur. Micro-scripts emphasize activities of individual learners.Conceptual Components of Scripts
ObjectivesCooperative learning
Cooperative learning is an approach to organizing classroom activities into academic and social learning experiences. Students must work in groups to complete the two sets of tasks collectively. Everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.
Cooperative Learning has 5 basic elements:
- Positive Interdependence requires that group members feel connected to each other in the process of accomplishing the goal.
- Positive Interdependence encompasses 9 sub-categories:
- goal - the expected outcome of the activity
- incentive; the reason the group wishes to complete the task
- resource; the tools needed to complete the task
- role; roles assigned to students to ensure each person contributes
- sequence; steps to completing the task
- simulation; the alternative mindset needed to complete the goal
- outside force; something limiting the time or used as a driving force
- environmental; that every group member is in close proximity to one another
- identity; that the group feels connected in one team.
Individual Accountability means that every group member is responsible for being able to demonstrate understanding and comprehension of the learned academic expectations and social goals.Face to Face Interaction suggests that the group must participate by communicating and discussing the goal.
Social Skills include listening, body language, sharing, accepting ideas and differences, etc. These are the skills needed prior to or being developed during the group work.
Processing is when the students assess their efforts as a group and can pin point areas of improvement in their social skills.
When doing activities in Cooperative Learning it is important to do a Contact Activity to ensure that the group has a basis for comfortable communication and feel open to one another.
Benefits include: higher self esteem, achievement and retention of academic information
- social support
- positive school attitude
- positive attitude towards educators and classmates
- on-task behaviour
- collaborative skills
- increase in level of reasoning
Considerations include: